ParSymG: a parallel clustering approach for unsupervised classification of remotely sensed imagery

Symmetry is a common feature in the real world. It may be used to improve a classification by using the point symmetry-based distance as a measure of clustering. However, it is time consuming to calculate the point symmetry-based distance. Although an efficient parallel point symmetry-based K-means algorithm (ParSym) has been propsed to overcome this limitation, ParSym may get stuck in sub-optimal solutions due to the K-means technique it used. In this study, we proposed a novel parallel point symmetry-based genetic clustering (ParSymG) algorithm for unsupervised classification. The genetic algorithm was introduced to overcome the sub-optimization problem caused by inappropriate selection of initial centroids in ParSym. A message passing interface (MPI) was used to implement the distributed master–slave paradigm. To make the algorithm more time-efficient, a three-phase speedup strategy was adopted for population initialization, image partition, and kd-tree structure-based nearest neighbor searching. The advantages of ParSymG over existing ParSym and parallel K-means (PKM) alogithms were demonstrated through case studies using three different types of remotely sensed images. Results in speedup and time gain proved the excellent scalability of the ParSymG algorithm. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 27 April 2016 Accepted 24 August 2016